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PSN Game Rental Service For PSP?

The PSP Go! continues to be the primary rumor of choice surrounding the handheld industry, but another one has just arrived and it's worthy of your attention.

According to PS3Center, Sony has issued a survey that asks one very revealing question: would you be interested in renting PSP games from the PlayStation Store? The survey goes on to ask more questions about how familiar you are with the PSN, how often you indulge in your favorite hobby, and many more PSP-related queries. And as PS3Center points out, they could all be classified under the "no UMD" rumor category because they tend to focus on a digital download delivery concept. Of course, as time goes on and technology gets better, we could extend this idea to the home consoles as well. The days of Blockbuster may be over thanks to Netflix, but perhaps GameFly will be the next casualty if one will be able to rent games online. At this point, it certainly isn't feasible but only time will tell... And it's very feasible for PSP software, so perhaps this will be one of Sony's big announcements at E3. You can already download movies and TV shows; why not a few pieces of handheld software to try? Really, the entire world is gonna go digital before you know it.

Is it a good idea? Will people definitely rent PSP games off the PSN? How might it ultimately affect software sales? We have many questions and so does Sony...guess we'll have to wait and see what happens.

If you look carefully at the properties on your PSP games you can actually see the necessary fields to allow a game to expire after a certain date. It's really just an extension of the whole game activation thing that the PSP does when you download a game from the PSN anyway. So this is something that Sony could probably implement in a very short time scale with a minimum of fuss.

Certainly it would be nice to be able to rent a PSP game for a day or two for a couple of bucks in order to try it out before I buy it. It would sure as hell remove one of the 'justifications' that free-tards and thieves like to use for their activity - the old try before you buy ruse. Of course, if you're still 'trying' a game after several weeks of playing, I think you've progressed from a taste test to a full meal - so to speak.Last edited by Highlander on 5/20/2009 12:31:53 PM

You can have a demo that lasts 5 minutes and tells you very little about the game other than the barest gameplay experience. Certainly it's hard to get a handle on the full game interface, characters and other aspects of a deep game with a 5 minute demo. All I'm saying is that if you can rent the game for an evening for a few dollars I can see a lot of people finding a game far more appealing after a short rental than they would after a very short demo experience.

As a gamer, I would want to be able to do it like Gamefly where I can use one game for as long as I like and then 'return' it in exchange for another game. From a business perspective, that could be a terrible idea. Nobody would have to buy the actual games anymore and the rental fees would be discouragingly high to attract new customers.